If OFSTED did not exist

what would we lose?

My teaching career as a physics teacher started in a grammar school in Jersey where around 30% of the children did not gain good GCSEs. At the time, I did not know or even really think about whether that was appropriate. Were we doing well, or were we performing poorly? There was no baseline data. There was nothing to compare our outcomes against. How effective was the school leadership? What did the leadership do? They organised the school, timetable, appointments, etc, very well. Managed the building through the caretaker. Meals and cleaning. In my first 5 years of teaching, no one observed me from the school, and the head of the department was a really good teacher who could have advised me how to improve had there been a culture of improvement. There was no real challenge to teachers unless there were behaviour issues. The one time a teacher was criticised was when a class misbehaved badly during his lessons. The focus was on reacting to his poor behaviour management.

Once in the 5 years, HMI visited Jersey and observed one of my 6th form lessons. The outcome was great for me. The visit was informal, unlike HMI visits to schools in England. More of that later.

I then moved to a large comprehensive school in Surrey. The vast majority were excellently behaved and willing to learn. Again no teacher ever observed my lessons, though the technicians had a small area at the back of my laboratory where tea was drunk by other teachers. Perhaps their observations were from that vantage?

I was appointed head of physics in a newly created comprehensive school in Sussex. No one ever visited my lessons to observe my teaching and comment. I watched one of my department as he was having difficulty with a class and offered some advice. We did speak a lot within the department about how we used the apparatus, and the focus was on how we used the apparatus.

I then moved to a London comprehensive school that HMI visited; the same HMI who arrived had a nice chat and tea with the head teacher and walked around the school a little. I might have been visited for a minute or two. Never did I receive any comments on my lessons. Misbehaviour again would be a trigger for visiting a lesson, usually to manage the behaviour so that the class could be taught.

The school kept running as it took all the children other schools wanted to eliminate. It survived because the quality of learning was never questioned. In my first year at the school, a year 11 GCSE physics class I took over at Easter had their examinations that summer. Not a single child gained a grade C or above. What was the reaction from the school leadership? Nothing. I knew that could not be acceptable. Why did no one even ask me about the class and its results? The results children obtained were never any focus. They were kept under control, and that was all that mattered.

The head teacher was a lovely guy, but he had no concept that schools were for learning and that the role of leadership was to lead to ensure the learning was as good as possible. He would have been running an utterly failing school had any effective form of inspection that considered learning outcomes.

I would be concerned that if OFSTED did not exist in some form and an organisation did not focus on learning, many schools like the one I have just described would exist. Without OFSTED, we would also not have significant pressure on leaders leading to the tragic suicide of a primary headteacher. What is the answer?